Poetry: Smoke and Steel

Overview

Published in 1920, "Smoke and Steel" gathers Carl Sandburg's hard-hitting poems about industrial life, wartime industry, and the people who keep machines moving. The voice is urban, engaged, and unsentimental: factories, railroads, foundries, and shipyards appear as central actors, their rhythms and noises shaping the language. Sandburg's attention falls on the visible and audible details of work, sparks, rivets, hissing steam, and the thick smoke that hangs over a modern cityscape.
The poems neither romanticize nor simply condemn mechanization. They record the exhilaration of production alongside the fatigue and danger experienced by workers. The images are often cinematic and immediate, presenting machinery and human bodies in close association and treating industry as a force that remakes landscapes, communities, and identities.

Themes and Imagery

The collection emphasizes labor as both creative and consuming. Workers are portrayed with dignity and specificity: their hands, faces, calluses, and songs appear as evidence of honest effort. At the same time, industry is shown as a process that can grind people down, smoke and metal become metaphors for the costs of progress. War-era poems link industrial output to conflict, highlighting how factories become instruments of violence as well as engines of livelihood.
Imagery is tactile and auditory. Repetition of sounds, clanking, pounding, whistling, creates a kind of industrial music that the poems mimic through rhythm and cadence. Concrete nouns and blunt verbs populate the lines; Sandburg often blends human and machine into single tableaux, so that a riveter becomes part of the rivet, a shipyard worker merges with the ship. Such fusions underscore a central tension: industry's capacity to build and to dehumanize, to produce objects and to alter the social fabric.

Style and Legacy

The language is famously plain and colloquial, favoring short, strong lines and free verse rhythms that echo the work sounds they describe. Sandburg's diction leans toward catalogues, repetition, and onomatopoeia, producing poems that read like oral reports or field notes. The tone shifts fluidly from celebratory to elegiac, often within a single poem, allowing quick moves between wonder at human achievement and sorrow for its consequences.
"Smoke and Steel" helped shape an American poetic response to modern industry and urban life, contributing to a wider literary embrace of everyday speech and social concerns. Its influence appears in later labor poetry, documentary styles, and strands of modernism that prioritize directness over ornate diction. The collection remains vivid as a historical and aesthetic document: it captures the sensory world of early twentieth-century industrial America while giving voice to the workers whose labor built much of the modern landscape.